A very angry post containing no jokes whatsoever.
So I've gotta tell you, I'm sort of freaking out a li'l bit over all this horrible, flaming, racist idiocy over the non-Ground Zero non-mosque. I mean, you know there's been anti-Muslim hysteria seething all these past nine years, but this really seems different in kind, in two ways:
1. People no longer even feel the need to hold up the feeble pretense that they don't actually hate ALL Muslims, just the terrorin' kind. This seems to have been the golden opportunity that a frightful number of people were just waiting for to basically assert that all Muslims are terrorists and that therefore their civil rights should be cavalierly abrogated. And, of course, it was completely predictable that we'd move immediately from the original subject of controversy to "those People shouldn't be allowed to build any mosques anywhere ever." Alphanumeric characters are not adequate for me to express the depths of my absolute and utter disgust for this racist scum.
2. Opposition to the non-mosque has become completely mainstream. There is no difference whatsoever here between allegedly respectable politicians and crazy people with blogs. I mean, good on Obama for at least asserting that they fucking well have the right to build the thing, even if it's horrifying that an assertion of the most basic of Constitutional values should seem necessary, and I suppose it could be worse in the sense that if McCain were President right now, there would be an anti-mosque bill winding its way through congress as we speak. But the neo-nazi garbage spewing from a rabid wingnut queen like Pam Gellar is absolutely indistinguishable from that spewing from Respectable Commentator and future Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, as well as innumerable other commentators and congressthings. And to complete the picture, even Democrats, like that scum-sucking piece of shit Harry Reid, are jumping aboard, whether out of their usual cravenness or out of real conviction--doesn't matter.
It's easy to hope that something like this will just blow over, but even if this specific incident does, the door remains open for more and much worse. Of course, I can pontificate about this with a certain detachment, what with being a religiously-unaffiliated white guy, but my helpless rage and sorrow just REALLY bubble to the surface when I think what it must be like to be a perfectly ordinary Muslim citizen, just trying to live his life (or hers, but Muslim women are generally regarded more as victims than active perpetrators--the whole "white men saving brown women from brown men" thing), which has to already be harder than it needs to be due to standard-issue tribalism and xenophobia, and to now have to deal with all this extra thuggish bigotry from awful, Julius-Streicher-esque (yeah, I went there--and it's goddamn well justified) demagogues who couldn't care less what violence they incite or whose lives they ruin in the name of their all-consuming hatred--and all with essentially no high-profile defenders on the putatively-other side.
I know this doesn't mean anything coming from me, and I know that even if it DID, nobody to whom it would matter will read it, but let me just say: I am sorry. I am so so so sorry that you have to live in such a deeply diseased, hateful culture. There is simply no excuse. All I can do is assure you that, appearances to the contrary, there is a very large minority of Americans who don't feel that way at all, for as little help as that is. Maybe it's condescending of me to even write such a thing, but what else can I do? I just feel so helpless in the face of this tidal wave of hatred.
I've said it before, but it has never felt more appropriate than now: the terrorists have won. Massively and decisively.
1. People no longer even feel the need to hold up the feeble pretense that they don't actually hate ALL Muslims, just the terrorin' kind. This seems to have been the golden opportunity that a frightful number of people were just waiting for to basically assert that all Muslims are terrorists and that therefore their civil rights should be cavalierly abrogated. And, of course, it was completely predictable that we'd move immediately from the original subject of controversy to "those People shouldn't be allowed to build any mosques anywhere ever." Alphanumeric characters are not adequate for me to express the depths of my absolute and utter disgust for this racist scum.
2. Opposition to the non-mosque has become completely mainstream. There is no difference whatsoever here between allegedly respectable politicians and crazy people with blogs. I mean, good on Obama for at least asserting that they fucking well have the right to build the thing, even if it's horrifying that an assertion of the most basic of Constitutional values should seem necessary, and I suppose it could be worse in the sense that if McCain were President right now, there would be an anti-mosque bill winding its way through congress as we speak. But the neo-nazi garbage spewing from a rabid wingnut queen like Pam Gellar is absolutely indistinguishable from that spewing from Respectable Commentator and future Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, as well as innumerable other commentators and congressthings. And to complete the picture, even Democrats, like that scum-sucking piece of shit Harry Reid, are jumping aboard, whether out of their usual cravenness or out of real conviction--doesn't matter.
It's easy to hope that something like this will just blow over, but even if this specific incident does, the door remains open for more and much worse. Of course, I can pontificate about this with a certain detachment, what with being a religiously-unaffiliated white guy, but my helpless rage and sorrow just REALLY bubble to the surface when I think what it must be like to be a perfectly ordinary Muslim citizen, just trying to live his life (or hers, but Muslim women are generally regarded more as victims than active perpetrators--the whole "white men saving brown women from brown men" thing), which has to already be harder than it needs to be due to standard-issue tribalism and xenophobia, and to now have to deal with all this extra thuggish bigotry from awful, Julius-Streicher-esque (yeah, I went there--and it's goddamn well justified) demagogues who couldn't care less what violence they incite or whose lives they ruin in the name of their all-consuming hatred--and all with essentially no high-profile defenders on the putatively-other side.
I know this doesn't mean anything coming from me, and I know that even if it DID, nobody to whom it would matter will read it, but let me just say: I am sorry. I am so so so sorry that you have to live in such a deeply diseased, hateful culture. There is simply no excuse. All I can do is assure you that, appearances to the contrary, there is a very large minority of Americans who don't feel that way at all, for as little help as that is. Maybe it's condescending of me to even write such a thing, but what else can I do? I just feel so helpless in the face of this tidal wave of hatred.
I've said it before, but it has never felt more appropriate than now: the terrorists have won. Massively and decisively.
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 11:07 PM
